Loader

Note Boxes 2015

In the first year – 2012 – the note boxes contained statements from members of the Jewish community and their children, whose parish was destroyed by the National Socialists. The following year in the boxes were texts from schoolgirls of the Elisabeth School in Marburg. Then, in 2014, members of today’s Jewish community in Marburg filled the boxes with their contributions.

The Making of the Note Boxes for 2015

“Against the stigmatization of groups within the population!” The quotations in the note boxes for 2015 address this problem. They were compiled by students of the Catholic Theological Seminar in Marburg, itself a part of the Theological Faculty in Fulda, affiliated with Philipps University Marburg. The project was initiated and the working group guided by Dr Klaus Dorn, who is a board member of the Society for Christian and Jewish Cooperation Marburg/Lahn.

Johanna Gockel, Carsten Breuer, Alexander Steyer, Anjuli Braun and Sören vom Schloß undertook a visit to the “Garden of Remembrance”, where they sought to relate this attractive place to the theme of the note box project. Following this each student went in search of suitable quotations. Together they discussed all the suggestions until a final selection of ten quotations was arrived at.

“After we saw the note boxes for the first time we decided quite quickly that we should use something to do with the current political situation,” says Johanna Gockel. The quotations should bring people to reflect, what is happening now, what has occurred in the past and whether there exist parallels between them. Particularly the current political situation around the refugees in Germany was of great concern to the students quintet, also the topic of the rejection of supposedly undesirables and strangers was to be interwoven with the events of past history. Nevertheless, the emphasis must be on “the fact that we are concerned here with a monument to Jewish victims,” explains Carsten Breuer.

 

“I think, that it is often unnecessary to overemphasize: here is a huge monument and woe be tide anyone who doesn’t understand it,” formulates Anjuli Braun. It would be precisely this unobtrusiveness and “not this ‘We reproach you now for what has happened, it’s your fault,’” interjects Alexander Steyer. And exactly this is fully in the sense of the note boxes, which should especially motivate further discussion.

“The fact that refugee accommodations are being set on fire shows that it is clearly very important to remember that such things cannot be allowed to happen again,” says Carsten Breuer. The connection of the past, the Night of the Pogroms in 1938, and the present situation: With this, the students see that past events are neither forgotten, nor are something independent from oneself. From this they would like to point out that Albert Einstein’s implicit regrets in his quotation “It is easier to break down an atom than a prejudice” lack validity …